Agriculture and Order

Abstract

If there was a revolution in English agriculture, it certainly did not come in the sixteenth century. The system of crop rotation, the breeds of sheep and cattle and the familiar round of the seasons remained substantially unchanged from the fifteenth century (and earlier) until the days of Coke and Townsend. Increasing demand brought back into cultivation some marginal land which had not been tilled for 200 years, and such land was particularly vulnerable to harvest failure. But the so-called ‘agrarian crisis’ of the Tudor period was not a crisis of production, or of technology, so much as of law and custom. The polemical case was summed up in a tract of Edward VI’s reign entitled ‘Certayne causes gathered together, wherin is showed the decaye of England only by the great multitude of sheep, to the utter decay of household keeping, mayntenance of men, dearth of come, and other notable dyscommodityes…’.¹ This theme was consistently pursued by moralists and preachers, going back to the days of Sir Thomas More and before, and reached a shrill crescendo between 1547 and 1553.